The Law: The Boon and Bane of IT-enabled Peer-to-Peer

Sharing and Collaborative Consumption Services

Abstract. IT-enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and collaborative consumption

services (SCCS) allow private persons to provide access for others to their cars,
accommodation and other physical assets. Together they constitute the so called
Share Economy. These services often operate in a legal gray area. The relation-
ship between the law and SCCS is bidirectional. On the one hand, the develop-
ment of new SCCS offerings has to comply with a broad body of existing regu-
lations. On the other hand, new P2P SCCS businesses often discover legislative
loopholes, thereby forcing the law to react. This article conceptualizes the com-
plex relationship between the law and IT-enabled P2P SCCS by means of a
framework. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated by analyzing a
specific SCCS in the electric vehicle charging infrastructure domain. The
framework should constitute an effective tool in the design of new and legal
P2P SCCS offerings.

Keywords: service, peer-to-peer, sharing and collaborative consumption, law,

relationship, share economy

1 Peer-to-Peer Services in a Uncertain Legal Environment

In the last decade, business ecosystems that facilitate access to otherwise idle physical
assets owned by private persons via Internet platforms have emerged and proliferated.
We refer to them as “peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and collaborative consumption ser-
vices” (SCCS) [1, 2]. Early SCCS platforms received great interest inform the general
public, causing an initial ‘buzz’ regarding the potential benefits of the idea [3, 4],
including claims of it being a “world-changing status” [5]. Several players have been
able to establish viable and profitable business models since then. The range of assets
shared via such platforms is wide, ranging from joint access to cars (Lyft) and ac-
commodation (Airbnb) or sharing of food (LeftoverSwap) and clothes (Share Closet).
What all the SCCS have in common is that they operate in a legal gray area.
The Uber.com platform offers a smartphone app that enables passengers to request
a taxi service from private drivers. The traditional taxi companies and professional
drivers have perceived the new service as an open provocation and threat to their very
existence. London’s taxi drivers initiated a word-wide storm of protest, claiming that
their own strict market regulations also need to apply to the Uber drivers [6]. These
regulations require cabbies to have a credit card reader installed in the car, pass a city-
mandated English proficiency exam and a written test on local geography, have liabil-
ity insurance, an annual criminal background check, yearly vehicle inspections and a

12th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik,

March 4-6 2015, Osnabrück, Germany
mandatory physical exam, to mention but a few [7]. In stark contrast the Uber driver
just provides the ride.
This example demonstrates the significant tensions within the relationship be-
tween the law and P2P SCCS. This tension prevails in-both directions, from the law
to SCCS and from SCCS to the law. In the first direction, regulations and authorities
may influence businesses that often need to operate in a legal limbo. The media have
discussed the phenomenon intensively and beyond the Uber case [8, 9], for instance
related to platforms for publicly sharing private accommodation [10], private Wi-Fi
[11] and private cars [12, 13]. The judiciary and executive authorities were required to
react to the SCCS phenomenon, and their responses tended to be restrictive on the
activities of the various providers and users. The need to protect citizens [7] and to
avoid tax losses through undeclared revenues [14] were offered as arguments for op-
posing and constraining emerging P2P practices. Local governments issued fines and
ordered platforms to stop operations [12]. For instance, a New York judge’s decision
that offering a private taxi service without a license is illegal, led to the immediate
shutdown of the P2P car rental service SideCar [15]. With regard to the second direc-
tion, SCCS challenge authorities, because they require new or modified regulations,
and accordingly the lack of prevailing market regulation creates a pressing need for
new legislation. For instance, the Colorado State [16, 17] in the USA was only recent-
ly one of the first to sign a legal proposal subjecting SCCS to the state’s regulations.
Against this backdrop, many Information Systems (IS) researchers, in the context
of the emerging field of Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) [18],
are striving to develop and evaluate IT artifacts for the service economy. We argue
that the described tensions pose challenges for the design and operation of IT, and that
a systematic approach to capturing the legal environment surrounding a particular P2P
SCCS will improve the design of IT artifacts for service systems of this kind. An
improved understanding of the tensions will help prevent service failure and termina-
tion, due to legal issues. Furthermore, actions will be encouraged from platform oper-
ators to help the platforms’ peer suppliers avoid legal complications resulting from
their use of the service platforms. Conversely, from the legal perspective, a greater
understanding is needed by the various players as to how the relevant laws should be
modified and extended locally and internationally, as thy are not appropriate in their
current form for the regulation of P2P SCCS [14, 19]. However, conceptualizations
for describing this multifaceted relationship are lacking. Therefore, the present paper
answers the following question: How can the mutual influence of law and P2P SCCS
be conceptualized in order to provide an instrument for improving the design of new
services?
The contribution of this paper lies in the development of a framework for studying
the mutual influence of P2P SCCS and the law for a specific business. It builds on
previous work from Knackstedt et al. [20]. We demonstrate the framework’s applica-
tion in an analysis of a specific P2P SCCS, in which an IT-solution enables private
people to provide public access to their own electric vehicle charging stations.
This paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides research background on P2P
SCCS and on related legal challenges. Section 3 describes our methodology. Section
4 explains the initial and the adapted framework. Section 5 demonstrates the applica-
tion of our framework. Section 6 discusses the research results, limitations, and direc-
tion for future research. Section 7 contains some conclusions.

2 Research Background and Related Work

2.1 Services
Service Science was a highly active research area within the IS community in recent
years. Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) is the design-oriented,
“normative” [18], sub-discipline of Service Science, which maintains a particular
focus on designing and delivering services in service systems.
Service is defined as the application of specialized competences, through deeds,
processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself [18].
The service system is a dynamic configuration of resources, including people, organi-
zations, shared information, and technology, all connected internally and externally to
other service systems through value propositions [18]. Accordingly, building and
evaluating IT artifacts of utility for the service economy is an important aspect of
SSME [21]. Below we consider a specific type of such service systems.

2.2 P2P Sharing and Collaborative Consumption Services

IT-enabled peer-to-peer sharing and collaborative consumption services are services

that are based on a subset of consumer practices, in which a) mere access is preferred
to ownership and a function instead of the product itself that enables this function
[22–26], b) the owner of the resource is a private person [27–32] and c) environmen-
tally driven resource utilization [33–35] [36–38] is an underlying paradigm.
Although different and often incompatible definitions of sharing and collaborative
consumption prevail in public and academic discourse [39–42], both can be seen as
two subsets of access-based consumption [26]. Both phenomena represent a shift in
consumer behavior towards alternative forms of consumption for reasons such as the
prospect of financial benefits [26, 43], confronting overconsumption [40, 44] and
addressing the degradation of the natural environment [45, 46]. However, they are
different with regard to whether or not there is financial compensation involved in the
provision of access to a privately owned resource. Sharing forms a qualitative rela-
tionship between involved peers, does not involve money [47, 48] and is associated
with values such as “equality, mutuality, honesty, openness, empathy, and an ethic of
care” [42]. Therefore, it must be distinguished from pseudo-sharing [49] such as tradi-
tional car sharing, which typically involves monetary compensation for the mobility
service. Collaborative consumption, on the other hand, forms a quantitative relation-
ship between participants through monetary or any other quantitative compensations
[26, 40, 50]. In the case of IT-based P2P SCCS, the technology plays an enabling
role, facilitating communication and transactions between peers that would otherwise
be impossible [1, 2, 51].
 While there is a significant body of research on sharing of digital goods [52–55],
IS research is silent with regard to the sharing and collaborative consumption of tan-
gible assets. This is especially true for its peer-to-peer-based subset in which concep-
tualizations and calls for further research are still in their infancy [31, 56].

2.3 P2P SCC Services and Law – Related Work

Given the lack of research on P2P SCCS itself, the mutual influence of law and P2P
SCC services has not yet been the focus of Information Systems research. The legal
challenges associated with P2P SCCS are mentioned in passing, if at all [40, 57–60].
This is different for the legal domain, where researchers and practitioners have indeed
acknowledged the challenges posed by P2P SCCS to the law and called for the legal
loopholes to be closed [41, 61–65]. However, the legal perspective on the issue is
one-sided and does not address the implications for the design and operation of P2P
SCC services as such. This creates the research gap that we address in this work.

3 Research Design

The research comprises two phases, namely the framework development (described in
Section 4) and the framework application (Section 5). In the first phase, we build on
the existing framework for the mutual influence of law and IS [20, 66] and adapt it in
order to capture the specifics of P2P SCCS. Existing SCCS conceptualizations and
descriptions of legal tensions in the extant literature inform this step.
In the second phase, we demonstrate the value of the framework for our purposes,
by applying it in a real-world P2P SCCS case. Fig. 1 depicts our approach. First, over
the period from December 2013 to June 2014, a team of researchers from industry and
universities (Table 1) identified legal issues related to the business model (Table 2).
We used the framework as an analytical “lens”, while collecting data through inter-
views with legal experts, workshops and expert panels, as well as from the related
academic literature and through law reviews. The identified issues were refined joint-
ly by a team of two researchers to the level of single influence effects imposed by the
law or the P2P SCCS on its opposing party. Finally, we merged common aspects into
groups and mapped them into to the framework.

Capture legal aspects

1
(Interviews, workshops, and literature research)

Granularization of aspects
2
(break-down of complex aspects into atomic aspects)

Categorization and mapping to the framework

3
(grouping of aspects and assignment to framework dimensions)

Fig. 1. Steps in the framework application

 Table 1. Involved researchers from industry and universities

Participant Role Background

1 Project manager at energy supplier IT Management
2 Technician at energy supplier Test Management
3-4 Researchers Marketing
5-7 Researcher IS
8 Project manager at energy supplier IT Management
9-10 Lawyers Energy supply
11 Lawyer and Researcher Electric mobility
12 Lawyer Energy supply
13 Lawyer Public law
14 Researcher Energy law
15-19 Domain experts at energy supplier IT Management, taxation, real estate
20 Researcher Public law, IT law
21 Domain expert at energy supplier Data protection

Table 2. Sequence of meetings executed

Label Date Participants Main focus

Workshop 1 2013-12-11 1- 7 Initial identification of problem areas
Workshop 2 2014-06-30 2, 6, 7, 8 Identification of fields for framework
Workshop 3 2014-09-03 8,9, 12, 15 Core requirements by energy law
Expert con- 2014-02–2014-06 8, 9 Energy law: customer unit, energy supply
sultations net, private and public charging spots;
(EC) 1 - 5 Insurance law
EC 6 2014-07-01 2, 8, 19 Tax law/ trade law: peer providers
EC 7 - 9 2014-07–2014-09 8, 9, 10 European law, tax trade law, contract law
EC 10 - 11 2014-09 –2014- 8, 11 Energy law: role of intermediary
11
EC 12 2014-09-09 12, 13 Rights of neighbors, right of way, admin-
istrative law
EC 13 2014-05-26 8, 14 Energy system sui generis
EC 14 2014-05-13 8, 16 Business registration peer providers
EC 15 2014-04-17 8, 17, 18 Right of way, entries land register
EC 16 2014-08-25 8, 31 Data protection, right to information
Discussion 2014-03-26 3, 7, 8, 20 Data protection, right to information

4 Mutual Influence of Law and P2P SCC Services

4.1 Initial Framework

By means of a systematic and rigorous literature review, Knackstedt et al. [20, 66]
developed a framework that uses an IS research perspective to study the reciprocal
influence between IS and the law. Fig. 2 contains a diagram of the framework.
 Restricting

Demanding Information
Law
System (IS)
Enabling
(application domain:
(legal regulations,
economic, legal, or
contracts, etc.)
Restricting governmental.)

Demanding

Enabling

Fig. 2. Framework for depicting the mutual influence of IS and law [20]

It comprises the two dimensions of perceived influence direction and perceived influ-
ence impact (we excluded the dimension “influence character” that is used in the orig-
inal publication). Perceived influence direction can assume the following attributes:
‘Law influences IS’, ‘IS influences law’ and ‘mutual influence’ (represented by the
direction of the arrows). This means that either the law is perceived as given and IS
has to adopt the given legal environment (Law → IS) or, vice versa, that IS force a
modification of the law (IS → Law). If both are the case, a “mutual influence” [66,
p.6] between the law and IS prevails (Law ↔ IS).
The dimension perceived influence impact further characterizes each influence in
terms of one of three different influence types: restricting, demanding and enabling
(annotated next to arrows). Firstly, in case of a restricting impact, a certain behavior
is constrained or prohibited. Both law and IS can exercise a restrictive influence on
each other. For instance, data protection requirements restrict the design of IS. Like-
wise, technological aspects may restrict the scope of a regulation, such as in the case
of a German regulation on obligatory TV and radio license fees on an individual ba-
sis. Specifically, the authorities modified the regulation because it was impossible for
them to control every desktop device for its capability to receive a television signal.
Secondly, both the law and IS may enable certain design options of the counterpart.
For instance, the contract law is an enabler for setting up legally binding relationships
within a particular IS. From the law perspective, certain IS may offer technologies
that improve or innovate legal operations. Thirdly, both the law and IS could in prin-
ciple demand actions from the opposing side. In the previous discussion of SCCS
business, we outlined several examples of businesses operating in a legal limbo with
subsequent demand for both IS (to comply with existing regulations) and for the law
(to create new or revise old regulations).

4.2 Adapted Framework

We adapted the framework of Knackstedt et al. for our purposes. Notably, we made
modifications to account for two specifics of P2P SCCS, namely the existence of two
different service provider roles (the intermediary and the peer supplier) (S1), and in
order to separate the influences of law and IS that are specific to the shared resource
type, from those influences that are resource-independent (S2). Fig. 3 exhibits the
adapted framework. Notably, when we talk about SCCS, we mean services that are
delivered by peer-suppliers to peer-consumers through intermediaries. This delivery is
enabled by IT supporting the activities required for the service to be delivered.

Information System
that implements a
P2P SCC Service

Restricting

Resource-independent
Demanding Intermediary

Resource-specific
Law
Enabling
(legal regulations,
contracts, etc.) Restricting

Demanding
Peer supplier
Enabling

Fig. 3. Framework for depicting the mutual influence of law and P2P SCCS

S1. To distinguish the peer providers from the intermediary. IT-enabled peer-to-
peer sharing and collaborative consumption services represent a special case of an
Information System. As we have already outlined, one of the most important features
of a P2P SCCS is that the resource owner is a private person [31, 43]. Accordingly,
actors in P2P SCCS can take the roles of peer suppliers and of the intermediary, the
latter representing the platform provider. Against this backdrop, the relationship be-
tween the law and IS in a P2P SCCS scenario can be refined into the relationships
between the law and the role of the intermediary and the relationship between the law
and the role of the peer suppliers. For example, the relationship of the Uber
smartphone app provider with the law is different from the relationship of the law and
the drivers as peer suppliers. Platforms such as Airbnb explicitly state that their cus-
tomers who provide private accommodations for the public are independent from the
platform in their legal obligations [68].

S2. To separate resource-specific and resource-independent aspects. The second

characteristic of P2P SCCS is that certain aspects of the relationship between the law
and IS are linked to the actual resource that is shared (such as accommodation or
cars), while others are not. We refer to the first group of aspects as “resource-
specific” and the second as “resource-independent”. For example, by offering access
to resources, private persons as peer suppliers may turn into business entities and
therefore be subject to regulations typically applied to businesses, regardless of the
type of the shared resource. At the same time, peer suppliers may violate terms and
conditions of building insurances – an aspect that is specific to sharing accommoda-
tion.
5 Framework Application: Designing a P2P SCCS for Electric
Vehicle Charging

5.1 Project Setting

In Germany, the Federal Government announced a policy goal of putting one mil-
lion electric vehicles on the country’s roads by 2020 [69]. According to the experts of
the German National Platform for Electric Mobility (NPE), a total of 950,000 public
and non-public charging points would be needed by 2020, in order to achieve a suffi-
cient nation-wide charging infrastructure [70]. Obviously, implementing a charging
infrastructure on such a scale requires colossal investments. Given the currently small
number of electric vehicle owners, these investments imply a high risk for potential
investors. A typical “chicken-and-egg situation” occurs, with potential users waiting
for the infrastructure and investors waiting for a substantial number of electric vehi-
cles to be on the roads.
The development of the framework was part of CrowdStrom – a large publicly
funded research project. CrowdStrom aims at designing and implementing an innova-
tive P2P SCCS business model in order to resolve this dilemma. The project aims to
empower the many owners of small and private charging points for electric vehicles
to make their assets available to public users. This would result in a lower need for
central investment, and the CrowdStrom network would extend rapidly while the
number of electric vehicles grows. Notably, CrowdStrom will develop an Internet-
based platform in order to network the peer suppliers, their charging stations and the
CrowdStrom customers. This platform will provide services such as authentication
and payment in the near feature.
In the process of designing this innovative P2P SCCS according to the law, we sys-
tematically assessed the legal environment, for the reasons described earlier. We
structured the analytical process in the following way (Fig. 4). First, a list of legal
questions and uncertainties was prepared, based on our naïve understanding of the
problem domain (Step 1). We then further structured and categorized our questions in
order to identify the relevant fields of law relating to these issues (2). We subsequent-
ly reviewed the literature in the identified fields of law, so as to obtain an overview of
the legal situation and to estimate the potential impact on the CrowdStrom SCCS (3).
We discussed the findings of this review with experts from the various identified legal
fields (from both academics and businesspeople) in order to identify the most relevant
aspects (see again Table 2 for an exhaustive list) (4). Throughout this process, we
identified further legal issues, which we then added to the list and to the discussions.
Finally, we documented all the identified issues in a report (5).
 Fig. 4. Process of assessing legal issues related to CrowdStrom
In order to describe the relationship between the law and the P2P SCCS CrowdStrom,
we used the information from the report to derive a consolidated list of granular legal
aspects within the framework. This corresponds to the second step in our methodolog-
ical approach (cf. Sec. 3). In the following, we present the application of the “frame-
work for depicting the mutual influence between law and P2P SCCS” to the relation-
ship between law and the CrowdStrom P2P SCCS.

5.2 Resource-specific Aspects of the Relationship

The major influence of the CrowdStrom intermediary on the law is of the type de-
manding. More precisely, the intermediary demands a clarification of the general
legal conditions that are applied to the electric vehicle sector, in order to comply with
the law in the context of its operations. Furthermore, the intermediary demands clari-
fication of the requirements for operating a private charging station. While there are
technical standards for public charging stations, as yet, there are none for private of-
ferings. Due to the specifics of the scenario, there were no cases identified in which
an intermediary restricted the law or where the intermediary enabled legal actions.
Likewise, the major influence of the CrowdStrom peer suppliers on the law also
have a demanding character. The peer suppliers demand legal regulation of the status
of a private charging point. The classification of private charging stations in terms of
the German energy law is unclear at present. It is conceivable that they fall either into
the class of customer units or into the class of energy supply nets, although neither
conforms perfectly to the CrowdStrom case. This is because the German energy law
aims at regulating the very large energy supplying companies and networks operators.
Consequently, it does not explicitly address entities that offer energy supply on small
scale to single end users. Thus, the peer suppliers demand adaptations of the law in
order to clarify their legal situation. For the same reasons, the peer supplier demand
legal clarification of insurance issues for commercial, private charging points.
The influence of the law on the intermediary is mainly demanding and enabling.
The law demands compliance with the product safety act from the intermediary and
the ‘CE mark’ be assigned to the charging stations. The intermediary has to ensure the
application of these standards within the entire system. The law further demands a
guarantee that all the charging station are used in the way intended by the products’
engineers and for the intermediary to provide the necessary operating resources and
measuring equipment. Apart from this, the law enables the intermediary to operate its
business by securing the right to use third party property. The intermediary can enter
liabilities in the land charge register in order to minimize the risk of operating assets
on property owned by a third party. Additionally, the law enables the intermediary to
develop an online application to promote its offer without being liable for the content.
The influence from the law to the peer suppliers includes demanding, restricting
and enabling relationships. The commercial law demands four characteristics for a
consumer unit, namely spatial coherence, connection to an energy supply net, no seri-
ous violation of competition regulations, and installation free of charge. If peer sup-
pliers together fulfill these requirements, the law enables the operators of customer
units to neglect certain regulations that apply only to larger companies. Although the
CrowdStrom charging points do not fall into the category of a customer unit, because
they are not free of charge, they have to comply with the energy law if classified as
energy supply networks. In this case, the German energy law demands compliance
with certain principles including security of supply, low cost, convenience, sustaina-
bility and efficiency. Furthermore, the law restricts the freedom of an electricity net
operator to deny access to its electricity network to an electricity supplier (discrimina-
tion policy). Yet, by this means, the law enables energy suppliers to claim network
access from (other) energy net operators. Nevertheless, the status of a CrowdStrom
charging point as an energy supply network is not evident, because the German ener-
gy law aims at regulating larger companies and not private persons.
The law enables an easier handling of the discrimination policy, by stating that
discrimination must not occur within a spatially coherent group of assets. Thus, one
charging point can have one fixed supplier, while another company could supply a
different charging point in the neighborhood, allowing latitude for competition. Fur-
ther, if electricity supply is a secondary service the law does not classify the company
as electric provider – such as a camping place that allows its customers to use its elec-
tricity connections for a fixed price per camping slot. Analogously, if the charging of
an electric vehicle is a secondary service, while parking is the primary service, the
law can waive the obligation of peer suppliers to comply with the energy law.

5.3 Resource-independent Aspects of the Relationship

The resource independent relationships between the law and the CrowdStrom inter-
mediary, as well as between the law and the CrowdStrom peer suppliers are of an
essentially routine nature, for they do not cover the exceptional case of private charg-
ing infrastructure. Neither intermediaries nor peer suppliers demand any new legal
regulations, but are influenced by the existing laws. Accordingly, the commercial law
demands sustainable behavior, the aim of making a profit, and participation in the
overall economic traffic from a commercial business operator. If one of these factors
is absent, an intermediary or a peer supplier cannot operate a business in accordance
with the law. Yet if all the requirements are met, the law enables the intermediary and
the peer suppliers to claim the status of a business operator, which gives them both
benefits and obligations. For instance, with regard to the law of taxation, the law de-
mands (requires) the intermediary and commercial peers to satisfy certain obligations:
I) declare type of income to the financial authorities, II) entrepreneurship, III) calcula-
tion of profit and loss, IV) accounting records. At the same time, the taxation law
relieves the commercial peer supplier of the duty to pay sales taxes, if earnings do not
exceed an annual limit of 17,500 Euro, and the law exempts them from paying com-
mercial taxes up to an annual limit of 24,500 Euro. With reference to domiciliary
rights, the law enables the peer supplier to implement his right to deny access to the
charging station for users who fail to comply with his own house rules.
The law allows for a contractual prohibition on the reselling of electricity received
via a private electricity contract. As a consequence, it restricts the actions of the in-
termediary (and the peer supplier), since every peer supplier needs to have the right to
resell the electricity received. The data protection act enables the intermediary to act
as a data processing agent. Consequentially, the intermediary may perform support
activities, such as data processing, without the need to be included as an official party
of the contracts made between peer supplier and users of the charging infrastructure.

6 Discussion

6.1 Contribution

This paper addresses the precarious relationship between the law and peer-to-peer
sharing and collaborative consumption services. We have extended an existing
framework for the study of the relationship between the law and IS, by augmenting it
with concepts from the field of P2P SCC. More specifically, we differentiated the
roles of the intermediary and the peer suppliers, and we separated issues that are spe-
cific to the shared resource from the issues that are not.
We believe that this paper contributes meaningfully to service research in the IS
community, because it is one of the few articles to consider the general phenomenon
of a shift in the consumer behavior towards sharing and collaborative consumption,
and it assists in the actual development of P2P SCC services. While the extant IS
literature emphasizes the impact of the legal environment in developing effective IT
artifacts for immediate utility, our summary of the current public debate on legal
premises and effects in the P2P SCCS context emphasizes that the topic has a particu-
lar high momentum in this field. To this end, the presented framework offers a con-
ceptualization of the mutual influence of law and P2P SCCS that should help other
researchers to study different P2P SCCS settings or to develop and evaluate innova-
tive useful IT artifacts for sharing and collaborative consumption businesses.
Furthermore, by focusing on the dyad of law and P2P SCCS and the reciprocal ef-
fects between the two, this work is a call for interdisciplinary service research. While
we concede that we do not oversee the related research in jurisprudence fully, we
argue that the framework could be a useful tool for researchers in this field. For in-
stance, we envision the application of the framework in several P2P SCCS scenarios
and an analysis of the resource-independent issues impacting on the relationship
across these scenarios. Such a study is likely to shed light on needs for new regula-
tions or for modifying existing regulations related to P2P SCCS, including issues
relating to tax law, liability law, and corporate law. We acknowledge that such find-
ings will always be bound to a specific judicial area.
The results presented in this paper yield further practical recommendations. We
have explained that disregarding the legal environment of a P2P SCCS may jeopard-
ize the continued existence of the business, and by means of public press reports, we
have demonstrated that businesses in fact often fail for that very reason. In this vein,
the presented framework aims at assisting managers in the design phase of new P2P
SCCS offerings, because the framework is a means of making them aware of possible
areas of conflict, so that, at an early stage, they can develop strategies for avoiding
legal problems. The framework enables IT managers to conduct systematic analysis
of law aspects related to any design choices occurring in the development of an inno-
vative business model. Being applied at this early stage, it allows problem fields to be
identified and critical aspects to be captured, both of which can become subjects of
subsequent in-depth analyses by the legal experts. Because the framework distin-
guishes between issues related to the intermediary from those related to the peer-
suppliers, the work may also encourage managers to carefully consider the situation
of their peer-suppliers. This may lead to strategies that limit peer-supplier liability.

6.2 Research Limitations

This study and the presented results are subject to some limitations, which in turn
suggest opportunities for future research. The development and application of the
present framework was organized by IS researchers. Thus, the framework focuses the
IS perspective on the relationship of law and P2P SCCS, thereby informing the design
and evaluation of IT artifacts for a growing part of the economies that is based on
sharing and collaborative consumption. Accordingly, it is very likely that researchers
with a legal background would have a focus. Nevertheless, we regard the framework
to be a promising starting point for stimulating further debate among the related disci-
plines, on topics and research approaches relevant to promoting our understanding of
the interrelations between law and P2P SCCS. We have demonstrated the application
of the framework in the context of one specific real-word P2P SCCS, and it proved to
be of immediate use for our purposes. However, this is obviously just an initial indi-
cation of the general utility of the framework. Future studies therefore might directly
take up the framework and test its application in other contexts, in order to increase
external validity, or develop experiments to test its ease of use.

7 Conclusion

After some initial hype, several peer-to-peer sharing and collaborative consumption
services (P2P SCCS) have been able to establish viable and profitable business mod-
els, in which private individuals provide public access to their physical assets, such as
cars and accommodation. However, P2P SCCS often act in legal gray areas, because
regulations are lacking or difficult to interpret in their context, resulting in a mutual
influence between the law and P2P SCCS. The aim of this paper was to conceptualize
this reciprocal influence. Accordingly, we developed a framework based on extant
work in order to provide an instrument for improving the design of new P2P SCCS.
The framework includes the dimensions “influence direction” and “influence impact”,
and it further distinguishes between two provider roles – the intermediary and the
peer-suppliers. Furthermore, it separates issues related to the shared resource from
resource-independent issues. Some initial evidence from the application in an electric
vehicle-charging scenario indicates that the framework is a useful instrument to im-
prove the design of new P2P SCC services, because it enabled us to explore the recip-
rocal effects of law and IT in the complex problem domain electric vehicle charging
and make design choices compliant with the German law.

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